Taking inspiration from birdwatchers this blog will be a record of every unique game I play during 2014. I will provide an overview of each game with my experiences or thoughts about the game. Additionally I will be tagging with labels shown on the left hand side for easy searching of game types.
On a grander scale I hope to inspire others to attempt their big year and experience the joy of gaming!

Sunday, November 9, 2014

124) Chaos & Alchemy

A fairly straight forward and quick card game. The goal of the game is to get cards out in front of you totaling 10 points. On a players turn they get actions equal to 1 + the number of successful dice rolls they have. Actions are used to draw or play cards and failed dice require a player to discard cards. Each card has a special ability that influences the game in different ways.

Starting set-up is easy enough

My starting hand

Our four player game

Some cards I managed to play

Unfortunately this game failed on multiple levels. My over arching dislike is the amount of luck involved in this game although more specifically: In our game the player going last had most of his cards taken by other players leaving them at a huge disadvantage before even getting a turn in the game. On top of that, the player to the right of the last player influenced the dice on multiple turns, which meant that the following player had to roll 6's in order to get additional actions. This essentially left the last player having no good cards to play and no actions to recover from the deficit. This was all decided before this player had any ability to do anything in the game. That by itself is enough to discourage future plays.

Additionally, there is the issue of complete random luck of what you draw on your turn. Everyone is drawing from a shared pile of cards. Some cards will be better then others. The player that wins will often be the one who randomly draws the better cards.

If you can't tell already, I'm not a big fan of this game and wouldn't recommend this one.